Recommended Film Books

Baba Yaga in Film By James Graham

In the 1960s, my father made it his mission to expose
my brother and me to underground theater and cinema. On his day with
us, usually Saturdays after catechism class, he would take us to
Greenwich Village to watch arcane, experimental "children's" theater he
had aggressively sought out from bulletin boards and small ads in the
East Village Other. He loved live underground theater, or the romantic
notion of it,
and was using us to experience it vicariously. It was obvious to us
that these "children's" productions were watered–down social action
plays performed as fables to pay the rent on the black box. Like most
nerdy young lefties who came to the Village to learn how to be cool, my
parents suddenly found themselves with kids and no longer participated
in as much theater and art as they had planned. Groups like Theater for
the New City,
the Living Theater, and the Bread and Puppet group adapted their
own agitprop plays into matinee–ready fairy tales for hip dads and their
kids. Often the groups used stories with clear enough subtext that they
needed no translation. I remember sitting through countless productions
of Through the Looking Glass, the drug and sexual references broader and broader with each performance.

Art cinemas, which were then tiny unventilated little caves
dedicated to showing French Third Wave films and California–made rock
operas, followed this same economic model before collapsing into the
decrepitude of 70s porn dens. But the artier the art house, the harder
it dug for unusual children's programming. I may never know who, other
than my father, with his autographed Spoken Word records and his
dog–eared copies of Evergreen, ever validated their programming choices.

All my life I have been attracted to certain icons — chief among
them: the house that walked on chicken legs. This image occurs
spontaneously and deliberately in art from so many cultures that I never
wondered about the source. I am at once shocked and comforted when
coming across it, as I have, in painting, sculpture, antique
illustration, anthropology, and music videos.

However, it was not until last
year, while reading a scholarly text
that
I discovered (or rediscovered) the tale of Baba Yaga and was able
to put a name to the image. I understood at once why it had cut such a
deep groove into my subconscious. I had first seen the image in a black–
and–white film in a dark, lonely theater around the age of five, and it
had been living somewhere in my mind ever since: the witch who dwelled
in a house on chicken legs that turned to face the sun, who commanded
trees to attack, behaved in a cruelly passive–aggressive manner, and was
just all–around freaky
and horrible. Upon reflection, it is not surprising that this
startling image should have left such a powerful mark on me as a child.

Using the Internet (Wikipedia and IMDB.com
specifically), it did not take me long to realize where exactly the
image of Baba Yaga, and others like it, had entered my life. It was
surprising to find that this was a traditional Russian icon, featured in
films exported from the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. Not
having any specific titles to work with, or any clues to go on other
than Baba Yaga's name,
I set out to watch every single film depiction I could find of the
witch and her walking house. I discovered that many of the Soviet films
made for young audiences from the 1930s onward were repackaged for
following generations and dubbed for foreign distribution. But because
they were ostensibly made for children, the grown–ups at the
distribution office did not seem to worry themselves about the hidden
meanings and double entendres inserted by the filmmakers, nor was there
much effort to smooth over the propaganda the Polit Bureau required of
so many Soviet filmmakers.

Taken in chronological order, the films of the Baba Yaga legend
reflect a history of the Soviet Union's political self–awareness. Like
France and Germany, Russia's first forays into feature films conveyed
the excitement of this new technology with adaptations of Jules Verne
stories and space travel sagas. The usual "camera magic" amusements were
made for children, often featuring a stage magician dressed as a crone
or warlock making his/her assistant "disappear" over and over. All sorts
of folkloric imagery found its way into these non–narrative shorts
until the government, unlike its European counterparts, realized
cinema's potential power to spread ideas — and then immediately sought
to control it.

Officially approved filmmakers were expected to make
tedious epics that echoed the Leninist lust for "real" stories,
dismissing fantasy and allegory as intellectual or decadent. Fairy
tales, which were seen as having the potential to "corrupt" children,
were replaced by useful, moral tales. Filmmakers had to be savvy enough
to appease the government, who now held the purse strings, while still
creating a sense of wonder and magic.
As early as 1924, directors like Yakov Protazanov, who came from
the theater, learned that film could be sold to two different audiences
at once: the Polit Bureau and children. Protazanov's science fiction
epic Aelita proved that audiences would sit through hours of
clunky revolutionary chest beating if they were given really cool sets,
costumes, and camera tricks. The success of Aelita and, a year later, The Legend of the Bear's Wedding,
set guidelines that all Soviet filmmakers would follow for another
sixty years: tell any story you want as long as it is clear that the
Tsarists,
or capitalists, brought misfortune on themselves by being selfish.

It was not until 1939 that the studios were comfortable enough to
revisit Russian folk tales in a big budget feature. That was the year Vasilissa the Beautiful
by Aleksandr Rou was made, marking the first time that the main legend
of Baba Yaga was told in film — though here the witch is played by a man
and the house's chicken legs are not seen until they are dead. While
unsuccessful as entertainment, the film was significant because it
struck a perfect balance between pro–Soviet, anti–Nazi/capitalist
propaganda and a faithful retelling of folk legend, and as such could be
exported without looking too silly.
The film contains some wonderful constructivist imagery, and the
communist adoption of the story of a brave mother who must rescue her
children from the witch is quite charming in its way — though it is also
sad to watch a children's fable given the ethnic prejudices of
adulthood. The release of this film signified that enough time had
passed to let the old magic and the old gods of Russian folklore come
back out of the woods in order to warn Soviet children about new enemies
and new evils.

From the 1940s onwards, the old witch's appearances grew more
frequent in books as well as in film, as her solid place in oral history
slowly wore down the Soviet realist resistance. As in the oral
tradition, she sometimes appeared as a malicious, kidnapping hag, and
other times as a benign old crone. Her confederates included all of the
standard allegorical characters of Russian folklore: the three woodsmen,
mushroom spirits, swans, bears, animated objects, etc. Baba Yaga was
used by filmmakers in a number of ways — as a main protagonist, as a
plot device, and as a kind of deus ex machina deciding the fate
of a loosely organized children's adventure.
(I see now that she was assigned a variety of evils by the shifting
political powers.) In "Vasilissa the Beautiful" she takes on a distinct
Black Forest tone, very organic and primitive compared to the clean
lines of the protagonists and their safe home town. In The Tale of Tsar Saltan she is a Rasputin figure poisoning the court. In The Tale of Jack Frost
she is surrounded by religious orthodox ephemera and a somewhat
condescending suggestion of Balkan ethnicity.

In Aleksandr Rou's The Golden Horns
(1974), Baba Yaga is covered in black velvet and crystals, living in an
intricately–carved wood shack that dances maniacally as the witch turns
children into large
day–glo colored mushrooms — as if Baba were drafted into service to
warn children of the potential dangers of Czechoslovakianism. It is
impossible to say how deliberate these innuendos were, but history has
shown that Soviet filmmakers were experts at playing political games.
What is remarkable is how well the folkloric images of witches, swans,
mushrooms, and bears survived being "disappeared" by revolutionary
realist storytelling, only to reemerge largely intact and be put into
service by the same propaganda system. This itself is the most
triumphant fable of all: the witch who was sent into the woods on her
flying mortar and pestle, kept hidden from the children by the new
reality–obsessed technocrats, then returned from exile to haunt the
grandchildren of her dismissers.